Seagate 1 Terabyte Barracuda 7200.11 Review

Introduction:

My first computer was a Commodore VIC 20; back then there was no such thing as a hard drive and you were lucky if your parents could afford to buy the tape drive just so that you could store some small programs you found in the manual that came with the machine. By the way, the programs were in code, so you had to write them on to the tape drive. I guess it was a good way of learning how to program, but it took forever since half the time while entering the data I missed some comma, backslash or switch. My next computer was a TI 286; things were a little better with the introduction of the five and a half inch floppy drive, but not much changed as you either had to write a program yourself or spend a fortune purchasing one.

As time progressed, things did get better and one day, I even saw this new piece of hardware called a hard drive. At first, I was very reluctant to purchase one since I had become so accustomed to my floppy. I could remember telling a friend, “that will never catch on, it’s too big and you can’t use it in someone else’s computer like a floppy.” Luckily, I was wrong and now I don’t know what I would do without my hard drive. Since their debut, hard drives have evolved and become smaller, faster and now can hold up to a terabyte of data, a big change compared to my first hard drive, which I think was about twenty megabytes.

The Seagate 1 Terabyte Barracuda 7200.11 which has a SATA 3Gb/s NCQ interface, is Seagate's answer to the growing problem of data storage. The 1 Terabyte Barracuda comes complete with Seagate's second generation of perpendicular recording and offers a 105Mb/s sustained data rate with 32MB of cache. So how will the Seagate 1 Terabyte Barracuda 7200.11 perform?

Closer Look:

There is really nothing fancy about the packaging of an OEM hard drive. The Seagate 1 Terabyte Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 3Gb NCQ was sent in a brown box filled with some peanuts and anti-static bubble wrap with the hard drive itself sealed in an anti-static bag. Many may think that since the hard drive has such a large capacity it would be a lot bigger than it actually is but that is not the case; it is as long and as wide as 90% of the hard drives available today.